Diana charities given £1.4m from BBC Bashir interview

THE BBC has made donations of £1.42million to be shared between seven charities linked with Diana, Princess of Wales, it has announced.

The corporation said it gave the money – derived from sales of the 1995 Panorama interview with the princess conducted by then BBC journalist Martin Bashir – to Centrepoint, English National Ballet, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, the Leprosy Mission, National Aids Trust, the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity and the Diana Award. In the interview, the princess spoke openly about her marriage to the Prince of Wales, telling Bashir “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”.

Last year, a report by Lord Dyson concluded that the BBC had covered up Bashir’s “deceitful behaviour” as he went about securing the interview and led to the Duke of Cambridge calling for it never to be aired again.

The BBC has previously issued an apology for the circumstances in which the interview was obtained.

It said: “The BBC had indicated its intention to donate to charity the sales proceeds derived from the 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales. The BBC has now done so.

“Given the findings of Lord Dyson, we think this is the right and appropriate course of action.”

The donations came from the BBC’S commercial revenue and not from the licence fee, the corporation said.

In July this year, Tim Davie, the BBC’S director-general, said: “I have decided that the BBC will never show the programme again, nor will we license it in whole or part to other broadcasters.”

♦ The BBC risked “glorifying terrorism” by giving airtime to a guest who accused Salman Rushdie of blasphemy, the corporation’s former governor has claimed.

Baroness Deech, a BBC governor from 2002 to 2006, said the discussion show Dateline aired journalist Abdel Bari Atwan’s remarks, claiming The Satanic Verses was “blasphemy” and that insulting the Prophet Mohammed was “very dangerous”.

The BBC has said the comments were not extreme, and representative of the beliefs of many Muslims.